Giovanni Boccaccio in his time was much more than the author of the Decameron. 
He was an all-round intellectual, interested in prose in the vulgar tongue as well as in Latin poetry and rhetoric, the power behind the humanist rediscovery of classical authors and enthusiastic promoter of culture. And he was also a man totally involved in the politics of his time.

In the very palace that has been the seat of the city government for eight centuries, the exhibition aims to rediscover and make public a little-known aspect of the writer from Certaldo, following the episodes of his political career in the structures of the Florentine Republic, to experience first-hand how closely culture and public life were interwoven in fourteenth-century Florence.
The exhibit, which includes rare documents, missives, literary works, as well as some portraits of Boccaccio, was significantly set up in that room of the Palazzo Vecchio where the famous fourteenth-century pictorial cycle, unfortunately lost, of Illustrious Men was located: heroes of the Roman Republic, monarchs, poets and men of letters. Among the latter, alongside Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio himself figured.

In some ways, Boccaccio’s public appointments were the first chapter of a story on the point of blossoming in Florence. A few years after his death, from the end of the fourteenth century, a period began of great humanist chancellors, an exceptional gallery of intellectuals employed by the Florentine Republic in the Chancery, the foreign affairs office, from Coluccio Salutati to Leonardo Bruni, right up to Niccolò Machiavelli. For this reason, Boccaccio’s experience was in many ways exemplary, being the start of the whole story. And this is why the itinerary proposed here is a voyage of discovery of the political and cultural roots of Renaissance Florence.